An Affair to Remember (1957)

Comedy During Tragedy

By Jeffrey M. Anderson

After his Oscar-winning hit The Awful Truth, director Leo McCarey came back 20 years later with another sophisticated Cary Grant film, but this one goes on to tug at the heartstrings. Cheapened by the many references in Sleepless in Seattle, An Affair to Remember plays much better than you might imagine.

McCarey had already used the plot in his 1939 film Love Affair: Grant and Deborah Kerr, both of whom are already romantically engaged, meet and fall in love on a cruise ship. They agree to rendezvous at the top of the Empire State Building in six months, but Kerr gets into an accident, missing the meeting and losing the use of her legs.

The director makes splendid use of Technicolor and the Cinemascope frame, both for huge comedy scenes and tiny emotional scenes, in an era when many other directors were intimidated by the wide format.

Fox's Blu-Ray looks glorious in full color and widescreen. It comes with a smart commentary track by historian Joseph McBride (with intermittent comments by singer Marni Nixon) which points out the movie's few flaws. It also comes with featurettes on McCarey, Grant, and Kerr, plus a trailer, booklet and other stuff.